Jerry Mander on the Globo-Mafia

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From an interview with Jerry Mander, a noted critic of globalization:

“London: Some people feel that now that communism has collapsed, free-market capitalism may be next. After all, the economy can’t continue to grow forever — at some point, an exponential curve has to either level off or crash.

Mander: I think that if I say “Yes, we have to rethink capitalism,” then it gets reduced to, “Oh, he’s anti-capitalist.” It’s not capitalism in particular that has to be rethought, it’s the whole economic structure. The global economy is not capitalism. I have a master’s degree in economics, and I know this is not capitalism. What we have now is a centrally controlled economy. The only capitalism that takes place is among the people who have no part in the real benefits of the system — you know, t he people at the lower rungs have some capitalism going with small stores and so on. But, basically, the great part of the system doesn’t function in a capitalist manner. It’s not a socialist manner either. It’s some kind of hodge-podge of connections that have been put together for greasing the skids of advanced development and growth and corporate benefit.

Free trade? Free market? We don’t have either of those either. We have some kind of combination. What we have is a corporate take-over of the rules and a lot of corporate authority.

London: Corporatism?

Mander: Yes, a corporate economy — an economy that is good for corporations. It’s not capitalism exactly, and it’s not socialism exactly, and it’s not anarchy either. It’s a different of system of organization in which corporations exercise the control and reap the benefits…”

—  Excerpted from the Perils of Globalization.

Other April Tenths…

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“Today is Good Friday, April 10, the 100th day of 2009. There are 265 days left in the year.

On this date in 1912, the RMS Titanic sets sail from Southampton, England, on its ill-fated maiden voyage.

In 1790, President George Washington signs into law the first United States Patent Act.

“In 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is incorporated.

In 1925, the novel “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is first published.

In 1932, German president Paul Von Hindenburg is re-elected in a runoff, with Adolf Hitler coming in second.

In 1957, Egypt reopens the Suez Canal to all shipping traffic. (The canal had been closed due to wreckage resulting from the Suez Crisis.)”

More here at Vindy.com

Good Friday, 2009

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 Reconciliation

Siegfried Sassoon, November 1918

“When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.”

The Psychopathology of CEOs

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From a website linking psychopathology and social organization:

“Some observers believe that there is a psychological continuum between psychopaths (who tend to be professionally unsuccessful) and narcissistic entrepreneurs (who are successful), because these two groups share the highly developed skill of manipulating others for their own gain…….

In general, the successful psychopath “computes” how much they can get away with in a cost-benefit ratio of the alternatives.  Among the factors that they consider as most important are money, power, and gratification of negative desires.  They are not motivated by such social reinforcement as praise or future benefits.  Studies have been done that show locking up a psychopath has absolutely no effect on them in terms of modifying their life strategies.  In fact, in is shown to make them worse.  Effectively, when locked up, psychopaths just simply learn how to be better psychopaths…………..

When two individuals interact with each other, each must decide what to do without knowledge of what the other is doing.  Imagine that the two players are the government and the public.  In the following model, each of the players faces only a binary choice: to behave ethically either in making laws or in obeying them.

The assumption is that both players are informed about everything except the level of ethical behavior of the other.  They know what it means to act ethically, and they know the consequences of being exposed as unethical.

There are three elements to the game.  1) The players, 2) the strategies available to either of them, and 3) the payoff each player receives for each possible combination of strategies.

In a legal regime, one party is obliged to compensate the other for damages under certain conditions but not under others.  We are going to imagine a regime wherein the government is never liable for losses suffered by the public because of its unethical behavior – instead, the public has to pay for the damages inflicted by the government due to unethical behavior.

The way the payoffs are represented is generally in terms of money.  That is, how much investment does each player have to make in ethical behavior and how much payoff does each player receive for his investment.

In this model, behaving ethically, according to standards of social values that are considered the “norm,” costs each player $10.00.  When law detrimental to the public is passed, it costs the public $100.00.  We take it as a given that such laws will be passed unless both players behave ethically.

Next, we assume that the likelihood of a detrimental law being passed in the event that both the public and the government are behaving ethically is a one-in-ten chance.

In a legal regime in which the government is never held responsible for its unethical behavior, and if neither the government nor the public behave ethically, the government enjoys a payoff of $0. and the public is out $100 when a law detrimental to the public is passed.

If both “invest” in ethical behavior, the government has a payoff of minus $10. (the cost of behaving ethically) and the public is out minus $20. which is the $10. invested in being ethical PLUS the $10. of the one-in-ten chance of a $100. loss incurred if a detrimental law is passed.

If the government behaves ethically and the public does not, resulting in the passing of a law detrimental to the populace, the government is out the $10. invested in being ethical and the public is out $100.

If the government does not behave ethically, and the public does, the government has a payoff of $0. and the public is out $110 which is the “cost of being ethical” added to the losses suffered when the government passes detrimental laws. Modeled in a Game Theory Bi-matrix, it looks like this, with the two numbers representing the “payoff” to the people – the left number in each pair – and government – the right number in each pair.

Government

No Ethics Ethical
No Ethics -100, 0 -100, -10
Society/People
Ethical -110, 0 -20, -10

In short, in this game, the government always does better by not being ethical and we can predict the government’s choice of strategy because there is a single strategy – no ethics – that is better for the government no matter what choice the public makes.  This is a “strictly dominant strategy,” or a strategy that is the best choice for the player no matter what choices are made by the other player.

What is even worse is the fact that the public is PENALIZED for behaving ethically.  Since we know that the government, in the above regime, will never behave ethically because it is the dominant strategy, we find that ethical behavior on the part of the public actually costs MORE than unethical behavior.

In short, psychopathic behavior is actually a POSITIVE ADAPTATION in such a regime.

The public, as you see, cannot even minimize their losses by behaving ethically.  It costs them $110. to be ethical, and only $100. to not be ethical.

Now, just substitute “psychopath” in the place of the government and non-psychopath in the place of the public, and you begin to understand why the psychopath will always be a psychopath.  If the “payoff” is emotional pain of being hurt, or shame for being exposed, in the world of the psychopath, that consequence simply does not exist just as in the legal regime created above, the government is never responsible for unethical behavior.  The psychopath lives in a world in which it is like a government that is never held responsible for behavior that is detrimental to others.  It’s that simple.  And the form game above will tell you why psychopaths in the population, as well as in government, are able to induce the public to accept laws that are detrimental.  It simply isn’t worth it to be ethical. If you go along with the psychopath, you lose. If you resist the psychopath, you lose even more…………

The psychopath never gets mad because he is caught in a lie; he is only concerned with “damage control” in terms of his ability to continue to con others. Societies can be considered as “players” in the psychopath’s game model. 

The past behavior of a society will be used by the psychopath to predict the future behavior of that society.  Like an individual player, a society will have a certain probability of detecting deception and a more or less accurate memory of who has cheated on them in the past, as well as a developed or not developed proclivity to retaliate against a liar and cheater.  Since the psychopath is using an actuarial approach to assess the costs and benefits of different behaviors (just how much can he get away with), it is the actual past behavior of the society which will go into his calculations rather than any risk assessments based on any “fears or anxieties” of being caught and punished that empathic people would feel in anticipation of doing something illegal.

Thus, in order to reduce psychopathic behavior in society and in government, a society MUST establish and enforce a reputation for high rates of detection of deception and identification of liars, and a willingness to retaliate.  In other words, it must establish a successful strategy of deterrence.

…..That is, identifying and punishing liars and cheaters must be both immediate and predictable that it will be immediate.

And here we come to the issue: concerning the real-world, human social interactions on a large scale, reducing psychopathy in our leaders depends upon expanding society’s collective memory of individual players’ past behavior.

  …— Laura Knight-Jadczyk

My Comment

Of course, I don’t agree that this is capitalism. It’s criminality and the absence of genuine capitalism. It’s monopoly.  In a genuine free-market regime, laws would be enforced swiftly and sociopathy wouldn’t work, because it would be punished immediately.

Risk and reward wouldn’t be separated, as they are today.

Nonetheless, I do like the analysis and find it a  compelling account of what society here (and elsewhere) has become.

The writer just lacks the historical and theoretical framework to understand that what she calls capitalism is only the diseased tumor produced by the state feeding on the free market.

Robert Higgs On Transcending Red And Blue Barbarism

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“During the painful years of the Bush regime, we had to endure the slings and arrows of the brown shirts who compose the so-called Republican base. Now that Obama has ascended the throne, the brown shirts of the left are emerging as the more conspicuous barbarians.  Thank God it is not the case, as far too many people suppose, that we must be on one of these sides or the other. We can transcend this disgusting political spectrum, placing ourselves neither on the left nor on the right – nor even in the so-called “independent” zone somewhere between them – but rather rising above the entire line and insisting that red-state savagery and blue-state savagery are equally despicable and intolerable. I daresay that the future of our civilization hinges on whether a sufficient number of us will choose this transcendence…”.

A great piece by Robert Higgs at Lew Rockwell.

Turning Beach Sand Into Gold – The Goldcor Swindle

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Perhaps the most famous scam of all was Goldcor, which also had links to other crimes – drug-running and penny-stock hustling…in Florida, of all places. Florida was also the center of mortgage-hustling and land speculation, not just recently but historically.

And the Florida crime circuit, like Madoff’s, had its New York outlet.

According to this piece, Fool’s Gold, by Craig Malisow:

“In 1987, Jerold Weinger was the CEO of a Wall Street brokerage firm crushed under an avalanche of coke.

One of the firm’s partners, six brokers and a receptionist were arrested in a massive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Wall Street sweep called Operation Closing Bell. A ninth employee was arrested in the firm’s Florida office. Partner Wayne Robbins ultimately pleaded guilty to drug charges, and seven of the eight others either pleaded or were found guilty of possession, distribution or conspiracy to distribute cocaine, according to the DEA’s New York office…..

“The firm had been in trouble even before the 1987 busts, according to a New York Times investigation, which revealed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged the firm with stock manipulation once in 1976 and twice in 1981. The firm settled each charge without admitting guilt, but was ultimately suspended from underwriting “over-the-counter” stocks for two and a half years……

The final blow came in 1991, when the National Association of Securities Dealers fined the firm $1.4 million for manipulating stock prices. The firm was booted out of the association, and its top officer, Michael Leeds, was banned from the industry….”

Lila here:

So you see, drug dealing and stock fraud were connected way back in the 1980s. About when Bernie Madoff began running his scam. And apparently, the SEC could and did move against some players successfully. Why not on Madoff then?

Especially when Weinger was no small potato. He was connected to another big-time operator, Joel Nadel.

The Malisow piece describes one of Nadel’s most infamous schemes:

“The SEC had already banned Nadel from the stock market 20 years earlier, but now the commission accused him of accepting bribes to tout worthless penny stocks in his bogus newsletters.

The New York Times, the Boston Globe and several Florida newspapers ran stories on Nadel in the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating with his participation in the Goldcor scandal.

In Nadel’s newsletters, including one from the fictitious “Royal Society of Liechtenstein,” he praised a company called Goldcor, whose founders said they invented a process to turn a 20-mile strip of black volcanic Costa Rican beach sand into gold.

“The sands that are removed from the beach are replenished by tidal action only after a few days,” wrote Nadel, who was not a partner in Goldcor. The scam was so elaborate that, according to The Washington Post, Goldcor’s principals flew prospective investors to Costa Rica in Learjets so they could visit the company’s laboratories and watch white-coated scientists turn sand into gold.

In April 1991, the government froze $6.6 million of Nadel’s assets; in August, Goldcor President Richard Brown was found in his home with a bullet behind his left ear; in November, a federal judge ordered Goldcor representative Carl Martin to refund $10.8 million to investors. An estimated 3,000 investors lost at least $50 million in the scam.”

The most interesting part of this little history is that the Royal Society of Liechtenstein was sold off, changing its name to the Oxford Club, which has been since then a part of Agora Inc. (Update, April 8, 2010: It merged with a pre-existing newsletter, The Passport Club (according to Agora’s website).

The Brown death was never seriously investigated, say some SEC officials, who believe it was a murder.

What’s even more interesting is that Nadel’s Chief Operating Office, Mark Ford, who was also banned from selling stocks directly as a result of the settlement with the SEC, changed his name to Michael Masterson, and followed the Royal Society of Liechtenstein to Agora Inc., as part of Oxford Club and as a consultant).


John Gatto on The Bartleby Project

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Thanks to Sunni Maravillosa  for posting this great piece, The Bartleby Project,  by John Gatto.

“The Bartleby Project

By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US, and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article on September 18, 1988, entitled “How to Revitalize Russia:”

No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.

Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But nobody should believe this step can be taken politically—too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action; the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion, not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the Jim Crow laws and attitudes; in the violent conclusion to the military action in Vietnam; in the dismissal of a sitting American president from office. In each of these instances the people led, and the government reluctantly followed. So it will be with standardized testing. The key to its elimination is buried inside a maddening short story published in 1853 by Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

I first encountered “Bartleby” as a senior at Uniontown High School, where I was unable to understand what it might possibly signify. As a freshman at Cornell I read it again, surrounded by friendly associates doing the same. None of us could figure out what the story meant to communicate, not even the class instructor.

Bartleby is a human photocopy machine in the days before electro-mechanical duplication, a low-paid, low-status position in law offices and businesses. One day, without warning or explanation, Bartleby begins to exercise free will—he decides which orders he will obey and which he will not. If not, he replies, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to participate in a team-proofreading of a copy he’s just made, he announces without dramatics, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to pop around the corner to pick up mail at the post office, the same: “I would prefer not to.” He offers no emotion, no enlargement on any refusal; he prefers not to explain himself. Otherwise, he works hard at copying.

That is, until one day he prefers not to do that, either. Ever again. Bartleby is done with copying. But not done with the office which employed him to copy! You see, without the boss’ knowledge, he lives in the office, sleeping in it after others go home. He has no income sufficient for lodging. When asked to leave that office, and given what amounts to a generous severance pay for that age, he prefers not to leave—and not to take the severance. Eventually, Bartleby is taken to jail, where he prefers not to eat. In time, he sickens from starvation, and is buried in a pauper’s grave.

The simple exercise of free will, without any hysterics, denunciations, or bombast, throws consternation into social machinery—free will contradicts the management principle. Refusing to allow yourself to be regarded as a “human resource” is more revolutionary than any revolution on record. After years of struggling with Bartleby, he finally taught me how to break the chains of German Method schooling. It took a half-century for me to understand the awesome instrument each of us has through free will to defeat Germanic schooling, and to destroy the adhesive which holds it together—standardized testing…..”

by John Gatto

My Comment

I once wrote the libretto for a one-act opera about Bartleby composed by a friend of mine at Catholic University.  Unlike John Gatto, I always related to Bartleby and understood it because my first education was in India.

Education in the liberal arts was terribly rote-like in India in the 1980s. Long lists of figures to memorize. Map boundaries that had to be drawn from recollection. Senseless lists of obscure kings and their completely fungible achievements.  Venkatappa I built 40 highways, 500 hospitals and 35 colleges. Krishnayya III built 35 roads, 502 colleges, 25 temples. Chandravarma XX conquered the Marathas or Rajputs or whoever in 807 AD…etc., etc. Not much in the way of ideas. The whole thing was like a long catalog. Lists of the building materials (limestone, gypsum, white marble) used for various famous mosques, monuments, temples – none of which I’d ever seen, since traveling in India was difficult and expensive for middle-class families. Nehru’s Five-Year Plans, every dam and hydel project, with the exact monetary figure for each one.

We’d copy the whole thing onto a large piece of brown wrapping paper and then memorize it in sections until we could reel it off without a flaw.  Some of the girls took a few – shall we say – chemical stimulants to pull off this feat. The week after our exams, we would all be flat on our backs with exhaustion, fifteen pounds lighter, and hardly any more enlightened than before our labors.  The next term, we’d go back to “bunking” class (playing truant) for the first few weeks to make up for this torture.

There  was also a lot of long-hand copying of notes, because photocopy machines were nonexistent in our college and books were precious when you were living in a hostel. I copied scores of T. S. Eliot poems into a long notebook. In another I copied essays about Jane Austen. We took notes copiously in the classroom, although our lecturers were often less informed about things than we were. When things got boring, the more practical girls took to crocheting long scarves or eating lunch surreptitiously.

The whole thing was calculated to destroy any intelligence or interest in the subjects we were studying. It was a long, medieval exercise in mental gymnastics.

Amazingly, many of us ended up no worse intellectually than people who had had the finest undergraduate training.

But it was in spite of what we went through, not because.

Libertarian Reading List

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From Dennis Nezic’s site (the Canadian Libertarian Party), a brief but useful reading list – this is for the young student who asked for one by email yesterday.

INTRODUCTION TO LIBERTY

  • Bergland, David – Libertarianism in One Lesson – AMA ASG LF
  • Burris, Allan – A Liberty Primer – AMA ASG FF
  • Ruwart, Mary – Healing our World – AMA FF LF
  • Sprading, Charles ed. – Liberty and the Great Libertarians LF
  • Narveson, Jan – The Libertarian IdeaAZ

ECONOMICS

  • Block, Walter & Michael Walker – A Lexicon of Economic Thought (FI)
  • Hazlitt, Henry – Economics in One Lesson (ASG, LF)
  • Friedman, Milton – Free to Choose (LF)
  • Reisman, George – The Government Against the Economy (LF)
  • von Mises, Ludwig – Human Action (FEE, FF, LF)

EDUCATION

  • Boulogne, Jack – The Zoo (FF, FEE)
  • Public Education and Indoctrination (FEE, FF)
  • Richman, Sheldon – Separating School and State (LF)

ENVIRONMENT

  • Anderson, Terry & Donald Leal – Free Market Environmentalism (FF)
  • Anderson, Terry L. ed. – NAFTA and the Environment (FI)
  • Bast, Joseph, Peter Hill & Richard Rue. – Eco-Sanity (LF)
  • Block, Walter ed. – Economics & the Environment (FF, FI)

FICTION

  • Anderson, Poul – Harvest of Stars (LF)
  • Rand, Ayn – Atlas Shrugged (FF, LF)

HISTORY

  • Lane, Rose Wilder – The Discovery of Freedom (LF)
  • Paterson, Isabel – The God of the Machine (LF)
  • Weaver, Henry Grady – The Mainspring of Human Progress (FEE,FF)

LAW & CRIME

  • Bastiat, Frederic – The Law (FEE, LF)
  • Epstein, Richard – Simple Rules for a Complex World (LF)
  • Hamowy, Ronald ed. – Dealing with Drugs (FF)
  • Lapierre, Wayne – Guns, Crime, and Freedom (LF)

PHILOSOPHY

  • Locke, John – Two Treatises of Government (LF)
  • Machan, Tibor – Individuals and their Rights (FF)
  • Narveson, Jan – The Libertarian Idea (LF)
  • Nozick, Robert – Anarchy, State, and Utopia (LF)
  • Rand, Ayn – The Capitalist Manifesto (FF, LF)
  • Smith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations (FF, LF)

POLITICS

  • Peter Brimelow – Patriot Games (LF)
  • Browne, Harry – Why Government Doesn’t Work (LF)
  • Hayek, F.A. – The Road to Serfdom (FF, LF)
  • Herbert, Auberon – The Right & Wrong of Compulsion by the State (FF)
  • Horry, Isabella & Michael Walker – Government Spending Facts 2 (FI)
  • Kendall, Frances & Leon Louw – Let the People Govern (FF)
  • Nock, Albert Jay – Our Enemy, The State (FF, LF)
  • Palda, Filip – Election Finance Regulation in Canada (FI)

SOCIAL POLICY

  • Adie, Douglas K. – The Mail Monopoly (FI)
  • Grant, R.W. – Rent Control and the War against the Poor (ASG)
  • Hamowy, Ronald – Canadian Medicine: A Study in Restricted Entry (FI)
  • Murray, Charles – Losing Ground (LF)
  • Sarlo, Christopher – Poverty in Canada (FI)

WAR

  • Opitz, Edmund ed. – Leviathan at War (FEE, LF)
  • Rummel, R.J. – Death by Government (LF)

My Comment

These are all from the right libertarian perspective.  I’d like to add some people whom right libertarians wouldn’t recognize as libertarian, but I think are. That includes Gandhi  (“My Experiments with Truth,” for example). I’d also like to add left-libertarians like Chomsky, Emma Goldman, some leftists who were dead on, like Orwell,  and Catholic writers like Chesterton. I don’t think you can understand libertarianism as just a doctrinal creed. In fact, I think you will arrive at morally unsupportable positions if you do. I think you need to read across the spectrum and then try to see what is useful and helps from every perspective.  Libertarianism isn’t (or shouldn’t be) an ideology.

It’s more a way of going on.  I don’t mean that it should lack principles. I mean that we should try to understand things functionally (as they work) or in context (how they’ve developed in a particular situation) and figure out how they really work. We shouldn’t become fundamentalist in our understanding of language. Or we will end up like the neoconservatives, to whom liberty always seems to be pursued through the most illiberal means.

Blog Etiquette

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I write this blog fairly informally, but just to make a few things clear:

(1) I’m happy to post something which I think doesn’t have another outlet and might provoke some thought. Whether I agree with it completely or not is less relevant.  I don’t really mind long-winded comments, but other  readers might and your chances of being read become much higher if you stick to the point at hand and don’t include very wide-ranging analysis. It’s up to you. I don’t mind. But no one will read it and they may avoid the thread altogether.

(2) I censor material.  Comments that are explicitly racist or offensive to general categories of people in what I consider unreasonable terms will get cut. However,  if you hold objectionable views but phrase them in a reasonable and civil manner, I let them stand – since expressing unfavorable political views is partly the reason for blogging. In other words, if you write “you are a filthy wog bitch etc. etc.” – I don’t consider that political speech. If you write, “I think Asian women who advocate immigration from Asia are pursuing a racial agenda” – I will let that stand.

(3) Personal comments about me I prune as I see fit.  Females blogging in an informal way become vulnerable to all kinds of dangers and so I prefer to keep the blog impersonal.  Besides, my mum and dad read it.

(4) I no longer respond to email unless I am fairly certain about the person  who’s sending it. I do appreciate all mail and try to respond on the blog to email as well as to comments. But I have become cautious. The fact is over the last two years, I have been spammed, harassed, stalked, had my email hacked, had personal email posted on the web, had my blog broken into, and been impersonated, in at least one case.  Some  of this was because of supporting Ron Paul, some because of my writing on Zionism, some of it arose from my books, which created a whole ream of problems too complex to explain, and some arose from something I was trying to investigate on my own.

Chinese and Russian espionage? (Updated)

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In the news today,  intelligence officials seem to have found evidence of Chinese/Russians mapping US infrastructure:

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Journal. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the United States and does not target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official.

“There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official told the paper, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama was not immediately available for comment on the newspaper report.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions, which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems, suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists…..”

More here at Reuters.

My Comment

I am not sure what these “software tools” left behind  were……and where they were left behind.

Since Homeland Security is a pervasive umbrella bureaucracy, it could refer to any part of government at any level.

Now, which companies are responsible for Homeland Security software and intelligence gathering?  See below for information on CACI.

Notice also that intelligence is no longer afraid of any terrorists being behind this threat. They wouldn’t have the sophistication, say officials.

Oh really? But we’ve been orange and red-alerted for the past eight years about just that threat, haven’t we? And somehow, these same not competent terrorists managed to pull off 9-11, didn’t they? And elude  the mighty forces of the US for years….despite our  dominance in global electronic surveillance technology…

But now, suddenly, officials know right off the bat that terrorist couldn’t be behind this.  Anyone else find that reasoning a bit suspect?

Please note, the officials who gave this information are not named in the piece.  Would help if we could find out who these unnamed intelligence people and cyber-security experts are.

 Update:

One of the most important, if not the most important, company involved in Homeland Security is CACI, a company I wrote about in LOE (it’s in the section that was cut out).

CACI’s chairman, Jack London, recently (March 24, 2009) addressed a symposium on asymmetric threats to US and Global Security in Arlington Virginia. His remarks included the following useful reference:

“Harvard professor, Joseph Nye, the man behind the term “soft power,” along with former deputy Secretary of State – and former CACI board member – Richard Armitage, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year: “Smart Power is a framework for guiding the development of an integrated strategy, resource base and tool kit to achieve U.S. objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.”

From the section cut out of LOE (this part completed around early 2005)

“We can monitor the entire globe,” says CACI’s CEO Jack London (21)

The depth of this penetration of government is not limited to telecommunications and intelligence. CACI also handles the Federal Aviation Administration’s global administrative-data network and runs a system for the Justice Department that lets lawyers pick through millions of documents for what they need. In July 2004 Transportation Services Administration, the villain of the pat-down searches abuse and an agency of Homeland Security, also became a new client. CACI’s  “Knowledge Management” systems capture and convert data to digital format, publish on the internet, manage the Freedom of Information Act process and declassification, electronic information distribution, and related services for the entire Department of Justice (including the FBI, Tax, Drug Enforcement, and Immigration & Naturalization) Defense, Transportation, DHS Customs and Border Protection, and the Environmental Protection Agency, computer and interrogation services to the Defense Department, and other agencies. (22)

CACI is thus at the heart not only of military intelligence, but of internal security, internet technology, air transportation, and law enforcement at home. It encompasses the most vital powers of the state in an octopus-like penetration of populations abroad and at home.

The nerve center of this octopus coincides with power centers and power brokers in Tel Aviv and Washington….”

See also, this piece from December 2005, on CACI’s involvement in disinformation and what’s been called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy, a blending of diplomacy, information ops and psyops.

Now, from my previous posts, you know I believe that our dear leaders are cornered and that the end game is about to roll out. What could that be? Keep temporizing while grabbing more power, use the power to hide how much has been lost and by whom, whistle cheerfully and twist as many arms as possible to keep the vaudeville act going, meanwhile start fanning public anger against everyone possible, from random rich people, CEO’s, bonus recipients, immigrants, China, Russia, terrorists, socialists, communists, anyone in fact other than the specific group of financiers, regulators and politicians whose finger prints are on this mess.  At some point, should things get bad enough, war  will be declared. For further support for this take, check Jake Towne’s very detailed analysis of why the stimulus money just isn’t enough to do anything (with which I agree, in the sense that this isn’t a problem that can be fixed…however, I disagree that it won’t cause inflation – it will, eventually) and why war might be the avenue out.